How to Monitor Linux System Performance

When you’re the system administrator, you must keep an eye on how well your Linux system is performing. You can monitor the overall performance of your Linux system by looking at information such as

• Central processing unit (CPU) usage
• Physical memory usage
• Virtual memory (swap-space) usage
• Hard drive usage

Linux comes with utilities that you can use to monitor these performance parameters. Keep reading to check out a few of these utilities and show you how to understand the information presented by said utilities.

Using the top utility in Linux

To view the top CPU processes — the ones that use most of the CPU time — you can use the text mode top utility. To start that utility, type top in a terminal window (or text console). The top utility displays a text screen listing the current processes, arranged in the order of CPU usage, along with various other information, such as memory and swap-space usage.

The top utility updates the display every 5 seconds. If you keep top running in a window, you can continually monitor the status of your Linux system. To quit top, press Q, press Ctrl+C, or close the terminal window.

The first five lines of the output screen provide summary information about the system, as follows:

• The first line shows the current time, how long the system has been up, how many users are logged in, and three load averages — the average number of processes ready to run during the past 1, 5, and 15 minutes.
• The second line lists the total number of processes/tasks and the status of these processes.
• The third line shows CPU usage — what percentage of CPU time is used by user processes, what percentage by system (kernel) processes, and the percentage of time during which the CPU is idle.
• The fourth line shows how the physical memory is being used — the total amount, how much is used, how much is free, and how much is allocated to buffers (for reading from the hard drive, for example).
• The fifth line shows how the virtual memory (or swap space) is being used — the total amount of swap space, how much is used, how much is free, and how much is being cached.

The table that appears below the summary information lists information about the current processes, arranged in decreasing order by amount of CPU time used. The table below summarizes the meanings of the column headings in the table that top displays.

Using the uptime command in Linux

You can use the uptime command to get a summary of the system’s state. Just type the command like this:

uptime

It displays output similar to the following:

15:03:21 up 32 days, 57 min, 3 users, load average: 0.13, 0.23, 0.27

This output shows the current time, how long the system has been up, the number of users, and (finally) the three load averages — the average number of processes that were ready to run in the past 1, 5, and 15 minutes. Load averages greater than 1 imply that many processes are competing for CPU time simultaneously.

The load averages give you an indication of how busy the system is.

Using the vmstat utility in Linux

You can get summary information about the overall system usage with the vmstat utility. To view system usage information averaged over 5-second intervals, type the following command (the second argument indicates the total number of lines of output vmstat displays):

vmstat 5 8

You see output similar to the following listing:

procs -----------memory---------- ---swap-- -----io---- --system-- ----cpu----
r b swpd free buff cache si so bi bo in cs us sy id wa
0 0 31324 4016 18568 136004 1 1 17 16 8 110 33 4 61 1
0 1 31324 2520 15348 139692 0 0 7798 199 1157 377 8 8 6 78
1 0 31324 1584 12936 141480 0 19 5784 105 1099 437 12 5 0 82
2 0 31324 1928 13004 137136 7 0 1586 138 1104 561 43 6 0 51
3 1 31324 1484 13148 132064 0 0 1260 51 1080 427 50 5 0 46
0 0 31324 1804 13240 127976 0 0 1126 46 1082 782 19 5 47 30
0 0 31324 1900 13240 127976 0 0 0 0 1010 211 3 1 96 0
0 0 31324 1916 13248 127976 0 0 0 10 1015 224 3 2 95 0

The first line of output shows the averages since the last reboot. After that line, vmstat displays the 5-second average data seven more times, covering the next 35 seconds. The tabular output is grouped as six categories of information, indicated by the fields in the first line of output. The second line shows further details for each of the six major fields. You can interpret these fields by using the table below. In the vmstat utility’s output, high values in the si and so fields indicate too much swapping. (Swapping refers to the copying of information between physical memory and the virtual memory on the hard drive.) High numbers in the bi and bo fields indicate too much disk activity.

Checking disk performance and disk usage in Linux systems

Linux comes with the /sbin/hdparm program to control IDE or ATAPI hard drives, which are common on PCs. One feature of the hdparm program allows you to use the -t option to determine the rate at which data is read from the disk into a buffer in memory. Here’s the result of typing /sbin/hdparm -t /dev/hda on one system:

/dev/hda:
Timing buffered disk reads: 178 MB in 3.03 seconds = 58.81 MB/sec

The command requires the IDE drive’s device name (/dev/hda for the first hard drive and /dev/hdb for the second hard drive) as an argument. If you have an IDE hard drive, you can try this command to see how fast data is read from your system’s disk drive.

To display the space available in the currently mounted file systems, use the df command. If you want a more readable output from df, type the following command:

df -h

Here’s typical output from this command:

Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda5 7.1G 3.9G 2.9G 59% /
/dev/hda3 99M 18M 77M 19% /boot
none 125M 0 125M 0% /dev/shm
/dev/scd0 2.6G 0 100% /media/cdrecorder

As this example shows, the -h option causes the df command to display the sizes in gigabytes (G) and megabytes (M).

To check the disk space being used by a specific directory, use the du command. You can specify the -h option to view the output in kilobytes (K) and megabytes (M), as shown in the following example:

du -h /var/log

Here’s typical output from that command:

152K /var/log/cups
4.0K /var/log/vbox
4.0K /var/log/httpd
508K /var/log/gdm
4.0K /var/log/samba
8.0K /var/log/mail
4.0K /var/log/news/OLD
8.0K /var/log/news
4.0K /var/log/squid
2.2M /var/log

The du command displays the disk space used by each directory, and the last line shows the total disk space used by that directory. If you want to see only the total space used by a directory, use the -s option. Type du -sh /home to see the space used by the /home directory, for example. The command produces output that looks like this:

89M /home